Welcome

As an avid reader and an avid data nerd, I decided to create this site to track some of my reading and favourite books, both for my own interest and for anyone looking for good book recommendations. Links where applicable are to independent bookstores. Support libraries and independent bookstores!

Current Reading

Current Books Reading

These are the books I’m reading right now. I often have an e-book from the library, a paper book from either my shelf or the library, and an active read-aloud book.

Cover	Book	Author	Description
	Jade City	Fonda Lee	The Kaul family is one of two crime syndicates that control the island of Kekon. It’s the only place in the world that produces rare magical jade, which grants those with the right training and heritage superhuman abilities.
	The Dawn of Everything	David Graeber & David Wengrow	Renowned activist and public intellectual David Graeber teams up with professor of comparative archaeology David Wengrow to deliver a trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution–from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of “the state,” political violence, and social inequality–and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.

Last 5 Books Read

These are the last 5 books that I’ve finished.

Cover	Book	Author	Description
	My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologizes	Fredrik Backman	Everyone remembers the smell of their grandmother’s house. Everyone remembers the stories their grandmother told them. But does everyone remember their grandmother flirting with policemen? Driving illegally? Breaking into a zoo in the middle of the night? Firing a paintball gun from a balcony in her dressing gown? Seven-year-old Elsa does. Some might call Elsa’s granny ‘eccentric’, or even ‘crazy’. Elsa calls her a superhero.
	Vengeful	V.E. Schwab	Magneto and Professor X. Superman and Lex Luthor. Sydney and Serena Clarke. Victor Vale and Eli Ever. Great partnerships—now soured on the vine. But Marcella Riggins needs no one.
	H Is For Hawk	Helen Macdonald	On the surface, H is for Hawk is a falconry book chronicling the training of a Northern Goshawk, and yet it is so much more. It is a brilliantly written memoir of the darkest time in Helen Macdonald’s life, as she struggled to cope with the sudden death of her father, noted photographer Alisdair Macdonald.
	Small Things Like These	Claire Keegan	It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.
	Laughing with the Trickster	Tomson Highway	Trickster is zany, ridiculous. The ultimate, over-the-top, madcap fool. Here to remind us that the reason for existence is to have a blast and to laugh ourselves silly.

Best Books Read Since 2020

The books in these sections are all ones that I’ve read since the start of 2020 (not necessarily books published in those years). I have put the authors whose works of fiction I’ve read and enjoyed at least 5 of (separate from single series) in their own categories here, because they would take up a lot of the different years’ top books. After that are my favourite primarily standalone works in fiction or non-fiction that I read in each of those years. They are ordered by when I read them during the year. I’ve also enjoyed reading a number of science fiction and fantasy series. Rather than choose individual ones for best-of-year lists, I’m just listing my favourite series in whole here on their own.

Authors

Favourite Authors

Richard Wagamese

Cover	Book	Author	Description
	Keeper’n Me	Richard Wagamese	The story of Garnet Raven. As a small child he was taken from his home on an Ojibway reserve and placed in a series of foster homes during the Sixties Scoop. Garnet eventually finds his way back home to the Whitedog Reserve in northwestern Ontario where he hails from, but it isn’t an easy journey.
	Ragged Company	Richard Wagamese	Four chronically homeless people–Amelia One Sky, Timber, Double Dick and Digger–seek refuge in a warm movie theatre when a severe Arctic Front descends on the city. During what is supposed to be a one-time event, this temporary refuge transfixes them.
	Indian Horse	Richard Wagamese	Set in Northern Ontario in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it follows protagonist Saul Indian Horse as he uses his extraordinary talent for ice hockey to try and escape his traumatic residential school experience.
	Medicine Walk	Richard Wagamese	The journey of 16-year-old Franklin Starlight and his dying, alcoholic father Eldon Starlight to find a burial site for Eldon at a place deep in the forest he remembers fondly from his youth.
	Starlight	Richard Wagamese	Richard Wagamese’s final novel is a rapturous and profoundly moving story of love, compassion, mercy, and the consolations to be found in the natural world.
	A Perfect Likeness	Richard Wagamese	The volume brings together two previously published novellas by Richard Wagamese, Him Standing and The Next Sure Thing, with a foreword from author Waubgeshig Rice. Both stories follow the lives of young men who have dreams for a better future.

Fredrik Backman

Cover	Book	Author	Description
	A Man Called Ove	Fredrik Backman	Ove, an ill-tempered, isolated retiree who spends his days enforcing block association rules and visiting his wife’s grave, has finally given up on life just as an unlikely friendship develops with his boisterous new neighbors.
	My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologizes	Fredrik Backman	Everyone remembers the smell of their grandmother’s house. Everyone remembers the stories their grandmother told them. But does everyone remember their grandmother flirting with policemen? Driving illegally? Breaking into a zoo in the middle of the night? Firing a paintball gun from a balcony in her dressing gown? Seven-year-old Elsa does. Some might call Elsa’s granny ‘eccentric’, or even ‘crazy’. Elsa calls her a superhero.
	Britt-Marie Was Here	Fredrik Backman	The story revolves around 63-year-old Britt-Marie, a woman who finds herself living alone after her husband has a heart attack and cheats on her with another woman. Needing to start a live on her own, she goes to the job centre and doesn’t leave until she has a job.
	Beartown	Fredrik Backman	Beartown explores the hopes that bring a small community together, the secrets that tear it apart, and the courage it takes for an individual to go against the grain. In this story of a small forest town, Fredrik Backman has found the entire world.
	Us Against You	Fredrik Backman	A story of the ways loyalty, friendship, and love carry a small community through its darkest days.
	Anxious People	Fredrik Backman	A poignant comedy about a crime that never took place, a would-be bank robber who disappears into thin air, and eight extremely anxious strangers who find they have more in common than they ever imagined.
	The Deal of a Lifetime and Other Stories	Fredrik Backman	Two novellas and a short story from Fredrik Backman
	The Winners	Fredrik Backman	Maya Andersson and Benji Ovich, two young people who left in search of a life far from the forest town, come home and joyfully reunite with their closest childhood friends. There is a new sense of optimism and purpose in the town, embodied in the impressive new ice rink that has been built down by the lake.

Becky Chambers

Cover	Book	Author	Description
	The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet	Becky Chambers	Fleeing her old life, Rosemary Harper joins the multi-species crew of the Wayfarer as a file clerk, and follows them on their various missions throughout the galaxy.
	A Closed and Common Orbit	Becky Chambers	Pepper takes Lovelace, the AI now housed illegally in an artificial body, back to her planet and helps her as she struggles to find her own identity and way of interacting with the world.
	Record of a Spaceborn Few	Becky Chambers	A teenaged boy rages against the limits of a world structed around family. A mother watches her children’s fears of space paralyze them. In the midst of these, an orphaned young man arrives in the Fleet, desperate for a home and security that he has never had. Accidents happen, but violence lurks, too.
	To Be Taught, If Fortunate	Becky Chambers	The story follows four astronauts as they travel beyond the Solar System on a research mission to document extraterrestrial life on four planets. The explorers are put into suspended animation for extended periods of time while they travel between the planets.
	The Galaxy, and the Ground Within	Becky Chambers	The Five-Hop is run by an enterprising alien and her sometimes helpful child, who work hard to provide a little piece of home to everyone passing through. When a freak technological failure halts all traffic to and from Gora, three strangers—all different species with different aims—are thrown together at the Five-Hop.
	A Psalm for the Wild Built	Becky Chambers	It’s been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools and wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again, fading into myth and urban legend. One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in.
	A Prayer for the Crown-Shy	Becky Chambers	After touring the rural areas of Panga, Sibling Dex (a Tea Monk of some renown) and Mosscap (a robot sent on a quest to determine what humanity really needs) turn their attention to the villages and cities of the little moon they call home.

Thomas King

Cover	Book	Author	Description
	Medicine River	Thomas King	Medicine River chronicles the lives of a group of contemporary First Nations in Western Canada. The novel is divided into eighteen short chapters. The story is recounted by the protagonist, Will, in an amiable, conversational fashion, with frequent flashbacks to earlier portions of his life.
	Green Grass, Running Water	Thomas King	An exploration of a group of characters living in the small Canadian town of Blossom. It explores the Native American struggle to come to terms with their identity in the twentieth century; each of the Native American characters in the novel is striving to find a balance between tradition and modernity.
	The Back of the Turtle	Thomas King	When Gabriel Quinn, a brilliant scientist, abandons his laboratory and returns to Smoke River Reserve, where his mother and sister lived, he finds that almost everyone in the community has disappeared. Even the sea turtles are gone, poisoned by an environmental disaster known as The Ruin.
	Indians on Vacation	Thomas King	Inspired by a handful of postcards sent nearly a hundred years ago, Bird and Mimi attempt to trace long-lost uncle Leroy and the family medicine bundle he took with him to Europe.
	Sufferance	Thomas King	Sufferance is a novel about Jeremiah Kemp, a man who has an ability to see patterns in human behaviour. His billionaire boss uses that ability to create profit and power and Jeremiah’s skills earn him the nickname “the Forecaster.”

Best Books of 2022

2022

Top 10 Fiction

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	The Mountains Sing	Nguyen Phan Que Mai	A multigenerational tale of the Tr<U+1EA7>n family, set against the backdrop of the Vi<U+1EC7>t Nam War.
	What Strange Paradise	Omar El Akkad	In What Strange Paradise, Eritreans, Egyptians, Syrians, Palestinians, Ethiopians, and Lebanese people all share a dream: To escape their lives and find a better place to live, a nicer future for their children, and an existence away from poverty and the chaos of war and political persecution.
	The Strangers	Katherena Vermette	The Strangers brings readers into the dynamic world of the Stranger family, the strength of their bond, the shared pain in their past, and the light that beckons from the horizon. This is a searing exploration of race, class, inherited trauma, and matrilineal bonds that—despite everything—refuse to be broken.
	The Overstory	Richard Powers	From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, the novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
	Once There Were Wolves	Charlotte McConaghy	The unforgettable story of a woman desperate to save the creatures she loves—if she isn’t consumed by a wild that was once her refuge.
	The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois	Honoree Fanonne Jeffers	Spanning two hundred years, it takes an intimate look at race, feminism, love, and family as told by a line of unforgettable Black women from America’s South. It focuses on a fictional African American family in Georgia, beginning before the state was Georgia.
	Sea of Tranquility	Emily St. John Mandel	In this captivating tale of imagination and ambition, a seemingly disparate array of people come into contact with a time traveller who must resist the pull to change the past and the future.
	An Unkindness of Ghosts	Rivers Solomon	Rivers Solomon’s novel is set on a giant generation ship, on an interstellar voyage of centuries, divided between the wealthy, light-skinned upper-deckers and the oppressed, laboring lower-deckers.
	The Invisible Life of Addie Larue	V.E. Schwab	France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever—and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets.
	Small Things Like These	Claire Keegan	It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.

Top 10 Non-Fiction

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures	Merlin Sheldrake	When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting bodies, analogous to apples on a tree. Most fungi live out of sight, yet make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that supports and sustains nearly all living systems. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel, and behave.
	A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey	Jonathan Meiburg	An enthralling account of a modern voyage of discovery as we meet the clever, social birds of prey called caracaras, which puzzled Darwin, fascinate modern-day falconers, and carry secrets of our planet’s deep past in their family history.
	Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey	James Rebanks	The acclaimed chronicle of the regeneration of one family’s traditional English farm
	Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life	Lulu Miller	David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. But the more of the hidden blueprint of life he uncovered, the harder the universe seemed to try to thwart him.
	Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest	Suzanne Simard	Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths—that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp but are a complicated, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own.
	People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present	Dara Horn	Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture—and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks—Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones.
	Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses	Robin Wall Kimmerer	Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses.
	Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter	Ben Goldfarb	Eager is the powerful story of how one of the world’s most influential species can help us fight drought, flooding, wildfire, extinction, and climate change — and how we can learn to coexist with our fellow travelers on this planet.
	H Is For Hawk	Helen Macdonald	On the surface, H is for Hawk is a falconry book chronicling the training of a Northern Goshawk, and yet it is so much more. It is a brilliantly written memoir of the darkest time in Helen Macdonald’s life, as she struggled to cope with the sudden death of her father, noted photographer Alisdair Macdonald.
	Laughing with the Trickster	Tomson Highway	Trickster is zany, ridiculous. The ultimate, over-the-top, madcap fool. Here to remind us that the reason for existence is to have a blast and to laugh ourselves silly.

Stats

FicNonfic	PageCount	BookCount
Fiction	24,884	69
Nonfiction	12,561	40
Total	37,445	109

All Books

Best Books of 2021

2021

Top 10 Fiction

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	Pachinko	Min Jin Lee	Pachinko is an epic historical fiction novel following a Korean family who immigrates to Japan. The character-driven story features an ensemble of characters who encounter racism, discrimination, stereotyping, and other aspects of the 20th-century Korean experience of Japan.
	Transcendent Kingdom	Yaa Gyasi	A portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief—a novel about faith, science, religion, love.
	The Shadow of the Wind	Carlos Ruiz Zafon	The Shadow of the Wind is a coming-of-age tale of a young boy who, through the magic of a single book, finds a purpose greater than himself and a hero in a man he’s never met.
	Migrations	Charlotte McConaghy	A novel about a woman who has always been running—from her childhood, her mistakes, her memories—and this time, she’s traveling from Greenland to Antarctica, following the world’s last flock of Arctic terns on their final migration.
	Go, Went, Gone	Jenny Erpenbeck	The tale of Richard, a retired classics professor who lives in Berlin. His wife has died, and he lives a routine existence until one day he spies some African refugees staging a hunger strike in Alexanderplatz.
	Greenwood	Michael Christie	The book uses the ringed cross-section of a tree as an organizing principle and structure. As Christie writes, “Wood is time captured. A map. A cellular memory. A record.” And, in some cases, a handy metaphor for a family tree.
	The Brothers K	David James Duncan	This novel spans decades in the lives of the Chance family. A father whose dreams of glory on a baseball field are shattered by a mill accident. A mother who clings obsessively to religion as a ward against the darkest hour of her past. Four brothers who come of age during the seismic upheavals of the sixties.
	Five Little Indians	Michelle Good	The book follows the lives of five young adults as they grapple with life after ‘Indian School’ in the 1960s. From their prison-like residential school on Vancouver Island, they are turfed onto the streets of Vancouver with no support, money, family connections or life skills.
	Cloud Cuckoo Land	Anthony Doerr	Cloud Cuckoo Land follows five characters whose stories, despite spanning nearly six centuries, are bound together by their mutual love for a single book.
	Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine	Gail Honeyman	The story of a quirky yet lonely woman whose social misunderstandings and deeply ingrained routines could be changed forever–if she can bear to confront the secrets she has avoided all her life.

Top 10 Non-Fiction

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	The Truth About Stories	Thomas King	“Stories are wondrous things,” award-winning author and scholar Thomas King declares in his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures. “And they are dangerous.”
	Voices from Chernobyl	Svetlana Alexievich	On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy.
	Life on the Ground Floor: Letters from the Edge of Emergency Medicine	James Maskalyk	Maskalyk witnesses the story of “human aliveness”–our mourning and laughter, tragedies and hopes, the frailty of being and the resilience of the human spirit. And it’s here too that he is swept into the story, confronting his fears and doubts and questioning what it is to be a doctor.
	Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers	Andy Greenberg	The true story of the most devastating act of cyberwarfare in history and the desperate hunt to identify and track the elite Russian agents behind it.
	Love Lives Here: A Story of Thriving in a Transgender Family	Amanda Jette Knox	An inspirational story of accepting and embracing two trans people in a family–a family who shows what’s possible when you “lead with love.”
	Underland: A Deep Time Journey	Robert Macfarlane	A journey into the worlds beneath our feet. From the ice-blue depths of Greenland’s glaciers, to the underground networks by which trees communicate, from Bronze Age burial chambers to the rock art of remote Arctic sea-caves.
	Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China	Jung Chang	A family history that spans a century, recounting the lives of three female generations in China, by Chinese writer Jung Chang. First published in 1991, Wild Swans contains the biographies of her grandmother and her mother, then finally her own autobiography.
	Educated	Tara Westover	Tara Westover was seventeen when she first set foot in a classroom. Instead of traditional lessons, she grew up learning how to stew herbs into medicine, scavenging in the family scrap yard and helping her family prepare for the apocalypse. She had no birth certificate and no medical records and had never been enrolled in school.
	A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life	George Saunders	A deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.
	Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty	Patrick Radden Keefe	The book examines the history of the Sackler family, including the founding of Purdue Pharma, their role in the marketing of pharmaceuticals, and the family’s central role in the opioid epidemic.

Stats

FicNonfic	PageCount	BookCount
Fiction	20,549	55
Nonfiction	11,451	36
Total	32,000	91

All Books

Best Books of 2020

2020

Top 10 Fiction

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	Cryptonomicon	Neal Stephenson	In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, a young United States Navy code breaker and mathematical genius, is assigned to the newly formed joint British and American Detachment 2702. This ultra-secret unit’s role is to hide the fact that Allied intelligence has cracked the German Enigma code.
	Shades of Grey	Jasper Fforde	For Eddie, life looks colorful. Life looks good. But everything changes when he moves with his father, a respected swatchman, to East Carmine. There, he falls in love with a Grey named Jane who opens his eyes to the painful truth behind his seemingly perfect, rigidly controlled society.
	The Left Hand Of Darkness	Ursula K Le Guin	The novel follows the story of Genly Ai, a human native of Terra, who is sent to the planet of Gethen as an envoy of the Ekumen, a loose confederation of planets. Ai’s mission is to persuade the nations of Gethen to join the Ekumen, but he is stymied by a lack of understanding of their culture.
	A Gentleman in Moscow	Amor Towles	A novel about Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, a Russian aristocrat who is condemned by Communists to spend the rest of his life confined in the Metropol, the capital’s most glamorous hotel.
	Roots	Alex Haley	The story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured as an adolescent, sold into slavery in Africa, and transported to North America; it follows his life and the lives of his descendants in the United States down to Haley.
	The Nickel Boys	Colson Whitehead	Based on the real story of a reform school in Florida that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children.
	The Book of Negroes	Lawrence Hill	The story of Aminata Diallo, who is captured by slave traders in Africa and brought to America. Aminata’s story illustrates the physical, sexual, emotional, psychological, religious and economic violations of the slave trade.
	Station Eleven	Emily St. John Mandel	Set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.
	Piranesi	Susanna Clarke	A book about a man, Piranesi, living in a grand labyrinth that is filled with statues, beset by floods and surrounded by celestial objects. Piranesi carefully documents the world around him, including the house’s many halls, the tides and the human remains that he finds.
	The Glass Hotel	Emily St. John Mandel	The book follows the aftermath of a disturbing graffiti incident at a hotel on Vancouver Island and the collapse of an international Ponzi scheme.

Top 10 Non-Fiction

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	The Body: A Guide for Occupants	Bill Bryson	The Body helps you become smarter about how to take care of and use this mechanism that lets you have life by explaining how it’s put together, what happens on the inside, and how it works
	One Native Life	Richard Wagamese	One Native Life is a look back down the road Richard Wagamese has traveled - from childhood abuse to adult alcoholism - in reclaiming his identity. It’s about what he has learned as a human being, a man, and an Ojibway in his 52 years on Earth.
	The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business	Wright Thompson	The Cost of These Dreams collects many of Thompson’s best articles but with a central theme running through them – the price and struggles that come with seeking and achieving success.
	When Breath Becomes Air	Paul Kalanithi	The memoir of Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon at Stanford University, who is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in his mid-thirties. Kalanithi uses the pages in this book to not only tell his story, but also share his ideas on how to approach death with grace and what it means to be fully alive.
	Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End	Atul Gawande	A meditation on how people can better live with age-related frailty, serious illness, and approaching death. Gawande calls for a change in the way that medical professionals treat patients approaching their ends.
	The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America	Thomas King	Neither a traditional nor all-encompassing history of First Nations people in North America, The Inconvenient Indian is a personal meditation on what it means to be “Indian.”
	The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration	Isabel Wilkerson	The story of how and why millions of Black Americans left the South between 1915 and 1970 to escape the brutality of the Jim Crow Laws and find safety, better pay, and more freedom in what is known today as The Great Migration.
	Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption	Bryan Stevenson	A memoir by American attorney Bryan Stevenson that documents his career defending disadvantaged clients.
	Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men	Caroline Criado Perez	The book describes the adverse effects on women caused by gender bias in big data collection.
	Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants	Robin Wall Kimmerer	A book about the role of Indigenous knowledge as an alternative or complementary approach to Western mainstream scientific methodologies.

Stats

FicNonfic	PageCount	BookCount
Fiction	26,095	65
Nonfiction	16,613	52
Total	42,708	117

All Books

Series

Favourite Sci-Fi / Fantasy Series

The Expanse

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	Leviathan Wakes	James S.A. Corey	Two hundred years after migrating into space, mankind is in turmoil. When a reluctant ship’s captain and washed-up detective find themselves involved in the case of a missing girl, what they discover brings our solar system to the brink of civil war, and exposes the greatest conspiracy in human history.
	Caliban’s War	James S.A. Corey	On Ganymede, breadbasket of the outer planets, a Martian marine watches as her platoon is slaughtered by a monstrous supersoldier. On Earth, a high-level politician struggles to prevent interplanetary war from reigniting. And on Venus, an alien protomolecule has overrun the planet, wreaking massive, mysterious changes and threatening to spread out into the solar system.
	Abaddon’s Gate	James S.A. Corey	For generations, the solar system – Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt – was humanity’s great frontier. Until now. The alien artifact working through its program under the clouds of Venus has appeared in Uranus’s orbit, where it has built a massive gate that leads to a starless dark.
	Cibola Burn	James S.A. Corey	Independent settlers stand against the overwhelming power of a corporate colony ship with only their determination, courage, and the skills learned in the long wars of home. Innocent scientists are slaughtered as they try to survey a new and alien world.
	Nemesis Games	James S.A. Corey	A thousand worlds have opened, and the greatest land rush in human history has begun. As wave after wave of colonists leave, the power structures of the old solar system begin to buckle. As a new human order is struggling to be born in blood and fire, James Holden and the crew of the Rocinante must struggle to survive and get back to the only home they have left.
	Babylon’s Ashes	James S.A. Corey	The Free Navy has crippled the Earth and begun a campaign of piracy and violence among the outer planets. The colony ships heading for the thousand new worlds on the far side of the alien ring gates are easy prey, and no single navy remains strong enough to protect them. James Holden and his crew know the strengths and weaknesses of this new force better than anyone.
	Persepolis Rising	James S.A. Corey	In the thousand-sun network of humanity’s expansion, new colony worlds are struggling to find their way. Every new planet lives on a knife edge between collapse and wonder, and the crew of the aging gunship Rocinante have their hands more than full keeping the fragile peace.
	Tiamat’s Wrath	James S.A. Corey	Thirteen hundred gates have opened to solar systems around the galaxy. But as humanity builds its interstellar empire in the alien ruins, the mysteries and threats grow deeper.
	Leviathan Falls	James S.A. Corey	As nearly unimaginable forces prepare to annihilate all human life, Holden and a group of unlikely allies discover a last, desperate chance to unite all of humanity, with the promise of a vast galactic civilization free from wars, factions, lies, and secrets if they win.
	Memory’s Legion	James S.A. Corey	A collection of short stories and novellas set in The Expanse universe.

The Murderbot Diaries

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	All Systems Red	Martha Wells	All Systems Red follows the (mis)adventures of Murderbot as it tries to protect its humans, when those humans get in trouble after the sudden disappearance of another team on the other side of the planet.
	Artificial Condition	Martha Wells	Murderbot returns to a site where it went rogue and killed a bunch of people, teams up with a research transport named ART, and falls in with a trio of researchers who are trying to negotiate a deal with their terrible employer.
	Rogue Protocol	Martha Wells	The case against the too-big-to-fail GrayCris Corporation is floundering, and more importantly, authorities are beginning to ask more questions about where Dr. Mensah’s SecUnit is. And Murderbot would rather those questions went away. For good.
	Exit Strategy	Martha Wells	Having traveled the width of the galaxy to unearth details of its own murderous transgressions, as well as those of the GrayCris Corporation, Murderbot is heading home to help Dr. Mensah—its former owner (protector? friend?)—submit evidence that could prevent GrayCris from destroying more colonists in its never-ending quest for profit. But who’s going to believe a SecUnit gone rogue? And what will become of it when it’s caught?
	Network Effect	Martha Wells	When Murderbot’s human associates (not friends, never friends) are captured and another not-friend from its past requires urgent assistance, Murderbot must choose between inertia and drastic action. Drastic action it is, then.
	Fugitive Telemetry	Martha Wells	When Murderbot discovers a dead body on Preservation Station, it knows it is going to have to assist station security to determine who the body is (was), how they were killed (that should be relatively straightforward, at least), and why (because apparently that matters to a lot of people—who knew?)

The Broken Earth Trilogy

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	The Fifth Season	N.K. Jemisin	The story follows the journey of Essun, mother and “orogene,” an oppressed, racially defined class of powerful earth-benders in Jemisin’s fictitious, supercontinental world, The Stillness.
	The Obelisk Gate	N.K. Jemisin	The book continues forward from an especially bad Fifth Season, one that may become an apocalypse. It follows two main characters: a mother and daughter, both of whom are magically talented (“orogenes”), who were separated just before the most recent Fifth Season.
	The Stone Sky	N.K. Jemisin	The Moon will soon return. Whether this heralds the destruction of humankind or something worse will depend on two women.

The Oxford Time Travel Series

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	Doomsday Book	Connie Willis	The story is set in two epidemics in two time periods, an influenza epidemic in 2054 and the Black Death in 1348, and the two stories alternate, the future time worrying about Kivrin, the student trapped in the wrong part of the past, while Kivrin back in 1348 is trying to cope and learn and help.
	To Say Nothing of the Dog	Connie Willis	The story of Ned Henry, a historian from Oxford University in the year 2057 who is part of a team attempting to reconstruct to the last detail the Coventry Cathedral as it was before its destruction during the WWII Nazi Blitz.
	Blackout	Connie Willis	Oxford in 2060 is a chaotic place, with scores of time-traveling historians being sent into the past. But now the time-travel lab is suddenly canceling assignments and switching around everyone’s schedules.
	All Clear	Connie Willis	Traveling back in time, from Oxford circa 2060 into the thick of World War II, was a routine excursion for three British historians eager to study firsthand the heroism and horrors of the Dunkirk evacuation and the London Blitz. But getting marooned in war-torn 1940 England has turned them from temporal tourists into besieged citizens struggling to survive.

Remembrance of Earth’s Past

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	The Three-Body Problem	Liu Cixin	Set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth.
	The Dark Forest	Liu Cixin	The UN forms the Planetary Defense Council (PDC) to coordinate defensive efforts against the impending assault of the Trisolarans, who have launched a massive invasion fleet that will reach Earth in around 400 years.
	Death’s End	Liu Cixin	Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge.

Hyperion Cantos

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	Hyperion	Dan Simmons	Seven pilgrims from different worlds are chosen for a mission to Hyperion. They must locate the Time Tombs. These structures continually move back in time and they are guarded by a dangerous figure called the Shrike. They must destroy the Shrike or manipulate the Time Tombs to preserve humanity.
	The Fall of Hyperion	Dan Simmons	On the world of Hyperion, the mysterious Time Tombs are opening. And the secrets they contain mean that nothing—nothing anywhere in the universe—will ever be the same.
	Endymion	Dan Simmons	A story of destiny and heroes. Aenea, the daughter of a cybrid and famous Hyperion pilgrim, travels 250 years into the future, to the year 3099 A.D., beginning her journey to become The One Who Teaches.
	The Rise of Endymion	Dan Simmons	Set more than 275 years after the fall of the Hegemony of Man, an interstellar organization connected by farcaster portals. The Roman Catholic Church has formed the Pax, an administrative entity that formalizes the Church’s control and implements a theocracy.

The Imperial Radch

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	Ancillary Justice	Ann Leckie	The story of Breq, the sole surviving “segment” of the artificial intelligence that once animated an interstellar troop ship, Justice of Toren, and its ancillary soldiers. Breq, the first-person narrator and protagonist, embarks on a quest for vengeance.
	Ancillary Sword	Ann Leckie	Once a weapon of conquest controlling thousands of minds, now she has only a single body and serves the emperor. With a new ship and a troublesome crew, Breq is ordered to go to the only place in the galaxy she would agree to go: to Athoek Station to protect the family of a lieutenant she once knew – a lieutenant she murdered in cold blood.
	Ancillary Mercy	Ann Leckie	While searching Athoek Station’s slums, Fleet Captain Breq finds someone who appears to be an ancillary from a ship that has been hiding beyond the Radch’s reach for three thousand years.

Teixcalaan

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	A Memory Called Empire	Arkady Martine	The story follows Mahit Dzmare, the ambassador from Lsel Station to the Teixcalaanli Empire, as she investigates the death of her predecessor and the instabilities that underpin that society.
	A Desolation Called Peace	Arkady Martine	A few months after A Memory Called Empire, alien forces massacre an industrial colony of the Teixcalaanli Empire. The Teixcalaanli admiral Nine Hibiscus, tasked with confronting the threat, requests an Information Ministry specialist to attempt to communicate with the inscrutable enemy.

The Machineries of Empire

Covers	Book	Author	Description
	Ninefox Gambit	Yoon Ha Lee	Ninefox Gambit centers on disgraced captain Kel Cheris, who must recapture the formidable Fortress of Scattered Needles in order to redeem herself in front of the Hexarchate. To win an impossible war Captain Kel Cheris must awaken an ancient weapon and a despised traitor general.
	Raven Stratagem	Yoon Ha Lee	When the hexarchate’s gifted young captain Kel Cheris summoned the ghost of the long-dead General Shuos Jedao to help her put down a rebellion, she didn’t reckon on his breaking free of centuries of imprisonment - and possessing her.
	Revenant Gun	Yoon Ha Lee	Shuos Jedao is awake… …and nothing is as he remembers. He’s a teenager, a cadet-a nobody-in the body of an old man; a general in command of an elite force. And he’s the most feared, and reviled, man in the galaxy.

Top 25’s

Here I went further back, as my book tracking includes back to 2015, and I also pulled in some books I’ve read over years before that, and tried to make an active list of top 25 books in each category, regardless of when I read them. There is lots of overlap with the 3 years above due to the number of books I read. A note on earth-based and non-earth based is simply that some of the sci-fi series were set on Earth or specified Earth-origin characters, and some were not. This made a reasonable way to split them in half rather than having a list of 50 books.

Top Fiction Lists

Top Non-Fiction Lists

Full Lists

Since I’ve been actively tracking my reading (2015 and on), below are the fiction and non-fiction I’ve read in that time. The lists are sortable and searchable. Following that are books I have on my shelf. They’re separated into unread and read, and can be searched and sorted.

Books I’ve Read

Books I Have

Looking for Book Recommendations?

These are some of the sites I look at for book reviews and lists of books.
* Literary Hub - Recommendations and reviews over all categories
* Book Riot - Recommendations and reviews over all categories
* Tor.com - Science Fiction and Fantasy
* Book Marks - Aggregated reviews of books
* NPR Books - NPR’s favourite books of the year (2022-2013), sortable by many categories
* Literature Map - Put in an author you like, and find a bunch of new ones you might enjoy
* Five Books - Top 5’s in a bunch of categories
* Electric Literature - Reading lists, articles, essays, and more